Dad jailed for giving teen steroids

GRANDVILLE -- Patricia Johnston wishes she could go back in time and do something to keep Jim Gahan, her former husband, from having the opportunity to inject steroids into Corey, their then 13-year-old son.

Press File PhotoCorey Gahan skates in 1999.

"But I had no idea at the time," said the lifelong Grandville resident Tuesday after a Sports Illustrated report detailing the shocking story went public on the Internet and is appearing in this week's edition of the magazine.

Gahan was sentenced Jan. 7 in Tampa, Fla., to six years in a federal prison. He is believed to be the first parent convicted of providing steroids to his own child.

"If I could go back, I wouldn't have been so flexible with letting Corey go to Florida," Johnston said. "I would have insisted he stay here, grow up here, stay in school."

Corey, 18, now estranged from his father, has been living with his mother in Grandville for the last year. He guards his privacy, answers questions with as few words as possible and works for a Grand Rapids area department store he declined to name. He agreed to cooperate when Sports Illustrated came calling only because he thought the story might help others.

"Maybe it can help some people in the same kind of situation," he said.

Corey, at age 12, was one of the world's top in-line skaters for his age group. He had the trophies and wins in Michigan and elsewhere to prove it.

But his father, who had a shared-custody agreement for the first seven years of his divorce from Johnston, wanted to move him from the Grand Rapids area to Ocala, Fla., a hotbed for the growing popular sport that some believed was headed for Olympic status.

"(Gahan) wanted the best coaches and chances for him to be the best, and I let Corey decide," said Johnston, who has since remarried and works as a hairdresser.

"He was 12, he loved to skate. He wanted to go. I look back, and I know he could have skated here. The sad thing is -- he was already a champion when this all started."

Corey said Tuesday he put up with the needles and injections of B-12 vitamins, human growth hormone and steroids in the from of synthetic testosterone because he was told by his father and others it would make him bigger and better.

"I was 13," he said. "I did what I was told."

The Sports Illustrated story, written by Luis Fernando Llosa and Jon Wertheim, outlines the involvement by Jim Gahan with a convicted Florida coach and bodybuilder, as well as a convicted steroid dealer who posed as a doctor.

It also reveals Corey's climb to national championships in three distances of in-line competition, and a record-setting dabble in speedskating.

Also part of the story are the failed drug tests after competitions at age 15, and later the two-year suspension from competition and the forfeit of results dating back to 2004 as recommended by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

Wertheim said Tuesday the Gahan case came to their attention as they worked on other stories on steroids. At one point they found a sign-in sheet at the posing doctor's office in which Corey's name appears between the names of Randy Paffo, better know as wrestler "Macho Man Randy Savage," and the late Brian Adams, a wrestler known as "Crush."

Wertheim and Llosa were struck by the age of Corey, as well as the fact he was an in-line skater.

"There's no NBA contract out there in the future, or NFL money with this," Wartheim said. "Olympics maybe, if he switches to speedskating. This story shows it doesn't matter what sport, how famous you are or how much money you can make."

"Steroids are pervasive in sports," said Llosa, who came to Grandville to interview Corey and his mother.

Wartheim posed a question: "How many fathers are doing this kind of thing in how many sports?"

Patricia said Corey was a victim of her former husband, and that her son has not been a problem since moving home.

"He's private, but a great kid and it's been great to have him around," she said. "We don't talk much about what happened. Corey wants to move forward. I want to help him move forward."

Corey, who at age 18 today weighs less than he did at 15, said he has not had any lingering health problems from the steroid abuse and feels great. He was home-schooled in Florida, and said he has a high school diploma. College is a possibility, but he said he hasn't made up his mind.

He hasn't ruled out a return to skating, and admitted he watched the speedskating at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, on television with some regret. He saw former in-line stars Apolo Ohno and Chad Hedrick on the U.S. speedskating team, as well as Kimberly Derrick from Caledonia, who he remembered from his in-line skating days in the Grand Rapids area.

"I thought about it," he said. "(The steroids) made me bigger and faster, but I wonder what I could have done without them."